As their relationship as monarch and retainer became closer, the second speculation gained ground:
2. The Queen is married to John Brown
The curious assertion that John Brown was the morganatic husband of Queen Victoria was first given publicity by the Scottish socialist republican nationalist Alexander Robertson in his curious pamphlet
John Brown, A Correspondence with the Lord Chancellor, Regarding a Charge of Fraud and Embezzlement Preferred Against His Grace the Duke of Athole K.T.
, which was published from 37a Clerkenwell Gardens, London, in 1873.
Robertson was obsessed with the idea that the seven-arched bridge across the River Tay at Dunkeld in Perthshire, completed in 1809 to the designs of Thomas Telford and largely paid for out of the funds of John Murray, 5th Duke of Atholl and his family, had a ‘fraudulent’ set of tolls set by the 6th Duke.
Robertson, who hailed from nearby Doundounadine, ranted on every possible occasion against the half-penny (return) fee charged to foot passengers across the bridge. Local feelings ran high and in 1868 people loudly complained that they had to pay tolls to cross the bridge to church, and the toll gates were consequently broken and thrown into the Tay. A detachment of the 42nd Royal Highlanders was called in to quell the ‘toll-gate riots’. Robertson identified the chief ‘fraudsters’ in this matter as George Murray, 6th Duke of Atholl, and his wife Duchess Anne, both good friends of Queen Victoria and members of her Court. Although his pamphlet was written after the 7th Duke had succeeded to the title in 1864, Robertson saw the Queen as a person who supported all the Murrays in their ‘banditry’ and regarded her as ripe for exposure.
The pamphlet, addressed to the Lord Chancellor, 1st Lord Selborne, detailed several outrageous accusations against the Queen and John Brown. Quoting Charles Christie, ‘House Steward to the Dowager Duchess of Athole at Dunkeld House’, Robertson averred that John Brown obtained regular ‘admittance’ to the Queen’s bedroom when ‘the house was quiet’.
23
He asserted that John Brown ‘acts as master and more’ with Queen Victoria who was easy to lead, being ‘weak-minded, or semi-imbecile’.
24
Robertson repeated the general gossip that John Brown kept Ministers of the Crown waiting ‘a whole day’ to deliver their dispatches to the Queen and would not allow Her Majesty to undertake journeys to places he did not approve of.
25
Warming to his subject, Robertson noted that Duchess Anne was in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1868, and in that place stood witness to Queen Victoria’s marriage to John Brown. Queen Victoria
was
in Switzerland at that time, but she was at Lucerne, not Lausanne; even so, the Dowager Duchess was later quizzed on the matter and poured scorn on Robertson’s assertion.
26
There was yet more, which led to the third assertion:
3. Queen Victoria gave birth to John Brown’s child
This was Robertson’s
coup de grace
, as he saw it, in undermining the Queen’s reputation, her throne and her friendship with the Murray ‘fraudsters’. Robertson named as his informant concerning the juiciest bit of gossip one John McGregor, Chief Wood Manager on the Atholl estates. He said that McGregor had told him that John Brown and the Queen had set out one day for a trip to Loch Ordie and along the way ‘Hochmagandy’ – the old Scots word for sexual intercourse – had taken place. Nine months later in Switzerland the resulting child was born, but, said Robertson, he was not suggesting that the Dowager Duchess ‘acted as
howdy
[‘midwife’]’.
27
Noting that what he recounted was well known ‘at various Courts of the continent’, Robertson added this for good measure: ‘A gentleman recently informed me that there is at present a thumping Scottish laddie in charge of a Calvinist pastor in a retired valley in the Canton of Vaud; but he would not mention the name of either parent although by his gesticulations I could easily understand to whom he referred.’
28
These stories were so ridiculous that no one could credibly perpetuate them to the Queen and John Brown’s detriment, although the assertions were officially noted. Robertson was never prosecuted for his undoubted libel, although the Lord Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl of Granville, did discuss the implications.
29
Even though the assertions were foolish in the extreme, the Queen’s detractors, from republicans to disgruntled staff, gave them the oxygen of publicity and many a similar story circulated with Queen Victoria in the role of ‘Mrs Brown’. So much so that pro-Victoria courtiers began to put the case for the Queen’s ‘innocence’ in her relationship with Brown. They pointed out that the Queen was hardly ever alone: a dresser or maid was always on hand, so no trysts
à deux
with John Brown were possible. Henry Ponsonby commented in a letter to his brother that Brown was ‘certainly a favourite, but he is only a servant and nothing more – and what I suppose began as a joke has been perverted into a libel’.
30
The nonsense that John Brown made Queen Victoria pregnant never went away and the gossip re-emerged in the 1970s, when the
Sunday People
newspaper ran a story under the headline ‘Was “Louise Brown” Love Child of Queen Victoria?’
31
Colin Cross of the
Sunday Observer
brought to the attention of a wider audience the fact that one Dr Micheil MacDonald, former curator of the Museum of Scottish Tartans at Comrie, Perthshire, had said that Queen Victoria had borne John Brown a son. MacDonald was in the public eye because he had bought for £1,760 a kilt (and tartan under-breeks) which Queen Victoria had given to John Brown. This Royal Stewart tartan kilt was to be an exhibit in the Tartan Museum. MacDonald told the press that the love child story had ‘come from a death-bed statement made by a minister of the Church of Scotland’. As with so many outrageous stories about the royal servant, MacDonald refused to detail his source. The story was taken seriously enough for Buckingham Palace to issue a denial pointing out that there was nothing in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle to substantiate the claim.
32
The story stimulated a response from Mr John Stuart who, according to a report in the
Sunday People
, said that when he worked for the royal bankers, Messrs Coutts & Co., The Strand, London, in the years immediately after the First World War, he read ledgers and letters confirming that ‘Victoria had a child by Gillie John Brown and that the [
female child
] was sent to live in Paris.’ Stuart revealed that the letters he saw were signed by one Louise Brown at a Paris address, where she was sent £250 ‘paid once a quarter’. Stuart went on: ‘The money was debited in the account marked “His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales”.’
Studying the correspondence, Stuart further commented: ‘At the time I thought she must have been one of King Edward VII’s children from the wrong side of the blanket. But what could have happened was that the King ordered the payments to continue after his death in 1910, to prevent a scandal involving his mother.’ Stuart was intrigued by the ‘tone of the letters and some of their phrases’, and added: ‘[
Louise Brown
] was far from being a begging-letter writer, but she wrote pathetically of her terrible straitened circumstances.’ A particular letter referred to how benevolent ‘dear generous Bertie’ [The Prince of Wales] had been, and how she appreciated the visits to the home of ‘dear [Princess] Beatrice’. Following up the story the
Sunday People
reporters were denied access to the Coutts & Co. archives and the assertions remain unconfirmed.
33
The fourth speculation about Queen Victoria and John Brown has accumulated the largest amount of written material.
4. John Brown was Queen Victoria’s spiritualistic medium
Spiritualism is a recognised religion whose fundamental theory emphasises that spiritual and supernatural forces directly intervene in daily life. In its refined form in the nineteenth century it came to represent the dual beliefs that the human personality survived death in some form and that it was possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. The modern aspects of spiritualism developed in the USA in 1848 as a result of events surrounding the Fox family at Hydesville, New York State, who claimed they had found a way to communicate with the dead. The spiritualist movement came to Britain in 1852 through the medium demonstrations of the American citizen Mrs Hayden, and the visits to Britain of the Scots-born medium Daniel Dunglass Home in the 1850s and 1860s sustained interest through the patronage of such people as the 3rd Earl of Dunraven. After this spiritualist societies sprang up in Britain and in 1873 the British National Association of Spiritualists was founded.
The enthusiasts of Spiritualism were anxious to recruit worthy and credible ‘names’ to their movement and who better than Queen Victoria.
Tinsley’s Magazine
, ever on the trail of a royal ‘scoop’, spread the rumour that the Queen dabbled in the spirit world, but the
Spiritualist Magazine
was bold enough to use the headline: ‘Queen Victoria: A Spiritualist’.
34
Thereafter her name was linked with prominent psychic mediums from Robert James Lees to W.T. Stead, all of whom were deemed to be clandestinely smuggled to the Queen’s presence to conduct seances and give ‘psychic advice’ from beyond the grave as to how she should rule. Not one shred of evidence exists to prove that Queen Victoria had any interest whatsoever in spiritualism, although some members of her circle, such as Lady Walburga Paget, clearly had.
It was only a short step to include the ubiquitous John Brown in the talk of spiritualism; after all, his relationship with the Queen remained a total mystery to many. The art critic William Michael Rossetti was even more direct: ‘The real secret about John Brown and the Queen is that Brown is a powerful [
spiritualistic
] medium, through whom Prince Albert’s spirit communicates with the Queen: hence Brown remains closeted with her alone sometimes for hours together.’
35
Not surprisingly, John Brown was linked with a Scottish psychic phenomenon known as
Taibhseadaireachd
– Gaelic for Second Sight – the gift of prophetic vision attributed to certain individuals, usually Highlanders.
36
Queen Victoria was aware of the supposed ‘gift’ through her Balmoral associations; her daughter Princess Louise married into the family of the Dukes of Argyll who were deemed to possess hereditary ‘Second Sight’. The Princess’s husband, Lord Lorne, was known to have said that he had had a prophetic vision of being offered the position of Governor-General of Canada, while the Princess’s sister-in-law, Lady Archie Campbell, was a prominent spiritualist. Brought up in the country, John Brown naturally had the countryman’s affinity with nature’s moods and weather lore, so his predictions of bad weather to come, or the imminence of natural disasters such as floods – prognostications all given credence by the Queen – could be built up by idle gossip into tales of supernatural capabilities.
None of these matters, from spiritualism to Second Sight, is reflected in any documents or artefacts held in the royal collection at Windsor. But, say believers, Princess Beatrice sanitised Queen Victoria’s papers on the Queen’s death and could have destroyed all references. Queen Victoria’s letters and journals are littered with her personal opinions and private thoughts. One set of intimate papers which Princess Beatrice had no control over were her mother’s letters to her daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany. Many still rest in the Kronberg Archives at Friedrichshof and not one of them hints at any interest in organised spiritualism or John Brown’s supposed involvement therein. The fact that the Queen was open with her daughter in her feelings of friendship for Brown would suggest that if he was her medium she would have hinted at it. Queen Victoria was convinced that the ‘spirit’ of Prince Albert always watched over her, but there is no evidence that she took any steps whatsoever to ‘get in touch’ with his disembodied presence.
Following Queen Victoria’s death from cerebral failure at Osborne House at 6.30pm on 22 January 1901, there was enacted a death-chamber ritual that would not be spoken of publicly for many decades. It was a solemn occasion in which John Brown, dead for eighteen years, would figure in memory. As the royal family dispersed from around the couch-bed in which the Queen had died in the arms of her grandson, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and her physician Dr James Reid, each trying to come to terms with the passing of a monarch who had reigned for sixty-four years and the almost mystical entry of another sovereign, the old Queen’s exhausted physician supervised the preparation of her body for interment. A series of coffins, fitting one inside another, were ordered, into which her body would be placed. After the family had said their last farewells in the bedroom, the room was sealed off with bronze gates to act as a family shrine for the next fifty years.
On Wednesday 23 January the royal cadaver was finally embalmed and Sir Hubert von Herkomer painted the deathbed portrait which still hangs at Osborne House. With the preliminary sketches completed, the Queen’s Chief Dresser, Mrs Tuck, who had acted as Dr Reid’s assistant, had a private meeting with the physician. Mrs Tuck read to Dr Reid the ‘Instructions’ which Queen Victoria had entrusted to her regarding the things she wanted to be interred in her innermost coffin.
1
Some of these items, the Queen had impressed, ‘weren’t to be seen by any member of her family’.
2
The dead Queen’s chosen artefacts were privately assembled by Tuck and Reid, and they carefully placed them on a bed of charcoal on the floor of the Queen’s innermost coffin, known as the ‘shell’. These items formed a set of mementoes, from rings and bracelets to lockets and handkerchiefs, reflecting the sovereign’s long life, together with Prince Albert’s dressing-gown, his cloak (embroidered by Princess Alice), the alabaster cast of his hand, and relics of her family’s childhoods.
3
On top of these was placed an all-enveloping quilted cushion. When the last item was out of sight the new King Edward VII and his brothers were fetched to assist in lifting the cadaver of Queen Victoria into the shell.